Wal-Mart Applies for Patent for Blimp-Style Floating Warehouse

The e-commerce world suffers from highly variable demand and more creative solutions are needed.”

Town to Town

A movable warehouse could serve a wider distribution area, Fletcher said, compared with a traditional warehouse that can only fill orders within a fixed driving distance. The airship could fly to one town and release a flock of drones to deliver packages, after which the drones would return to the vessel and restock while it flew to the next town. Such a system would be more efficient than having the drones fly back to a central distribution hub, according to research firm CB Insights.

“There are numerous ways to distribute and deliver products,” according to Wal-Mart’s patent application. “Getting the product to a delivery location, however, can cause undesirable delays, can add cost and reduce revenue.”

Wal-Mart’s application stands a good chance of getting approved as it goes into more detail about the implementation of a gas-filled aircraft than Amazon’s patent, which is a more general description of the concept of airborne-delivery systems, according to Khaled Fekih-Romdhane, managing partner at patent-licensing firm Longhorn IP.

This isn’t the first time Wal-Mart has shadowed Amazon’s intellectual property. In October, it filed a patent application for a web-based system similar to Amazon’s Dash buttons, which can quickly reorder household goods like paper towels or razor blades. The technology could also gather shopper data, such as how often a product is used and at what times of day.

In recent years, Wal-Mart has significantly stepped up its patent filings, many of which focus on web development and easing shoppers’ journey through the store. The company has also filed a patent for in-store drones that would ferry products from the backroom to the sales floor.

This is straight out of the super villain handbook

Amazon and Walmart are going to war in the sky with swarm armies on Zeppelins what a time to be alive.

It's about time that blimps came back.

The only reason they disappeared was that they were bad PR

>>169900
That would be so fucking cool, way better than the house to house fighting in the Cola Wars

Bimp train when

the day I walk outside and see Wal Mart and Amazon blimps letting loose thousands of drones like the Citadel releasing scanners in the opening of Half Life 2 is the day I know for certain I live in the future

This probably wont ever actually become a real thing, companies make patents all the time just for the sake of claiming ownership over something, or to prevent other people from doing the same.

So disregarding the technological feasibility and the FAA, how would any of this delivery stuff work when people own the low level airspace over their own property?

Would they just do it anyway and fuck the legality like the Google streetview project?

>>169895
>that doodle of a cloud system

we will live in a time of corperate blimps designed to automatically sell shit to you from the sky controlled by cloud computing systems.
Mega corp blimps will be hacked and made to dump luxury goods from the sky.
What a time to be alive.

>>169948
Nobody owns airspace except the government, no matter how low it is.

>>169984
Ah, the old "I'm not touching you" rule

>>169984
Except you do. 350-500 feet up depending on the area. Welcome to America.

>>170018
>The blimp-style machine would fly at heights between 500 feet and 1,000 feet

>>170020
No duh. The post was about delivery. All those drones flying up and down with packages are going to be crossing through a shit ton of personal airspace.

>>170021
not if they fly up in the airspace of the house that requested the package until it leaves the residents air space and can safety head back to the mothership with out crossing any one else airspace.

>>170023
Impossible with zero lot line homes and any sort of decent wind. And supremely energy inefficient on top of that.

>>169948
Probably the same way a delivery driver disregards your personal property for a few feet when they have to walk up to your front door. Also if you're that concerned about your airspace maybe just don't order drone delivery

>>170027
The point is an any kind of urban or suburban area they have to pass through dozens if not hundreds of people's personal airspace to deliver one package, people who didn't order packages.

A better analogy would be the non-USPS delivery man driving through everyone's backyard on the street to get a package to the guy at the end of the block.

Personally, I think they'll just ignore it. And if NIMBY people start making a fuss they'll probably leverage the state for immanent domain of a permanent easement.

>>170031
Get a ballista or cannon and defend your back yard, sky-NIMBY!

>>170021
>>170023

Most likely it would use drones to deliver the packages

The real question is what happens when one of them goes down and wipes out a while subdivision

>>170037

>mfw the ancap predictions of people defending their homes against corporate motherships is becoming a reality
>mfw you can't post reaction images on /new/

>>169895
shooting down delivery drones will be the new cow tipping. there are great times ahead.

>>169895
>Ha Ha! Said the Wal-Mart executives. This will stop Boxing Day chaos on our stores forever!

>Boxing Day 2020: thousands of screaming, flailing, angry shoppers float themselves up to the flying warehouses with giant balloons ties around their waists and do battle with each other.

I can see the headlines now


"YouTube vlogger dead after hackers fly warehouse into his apartment"

>>170043
What happens is wall mart pays out about a hundred million dollars in settlements, and writes it off as a net gain because you can't shoplift from something flying

>>170093
that sounds like a fucking challenge to me.

sky pirates, assemble!!

>>170107
>this
was expecting something like ythis comment,
imagine like 50 hood people hijack that mart and tow it away like a jetski

>>169895 so begins the age of the sky pirate

>>169895
>pilot jerking it during routine flight
>forgets to auto-path
>balloon snags a skyscraper and rips
>people killed by falling household appliances
>frozen pizzas and vagisil everywhere
>fights break out over littered "I hate Monday" sweatshirts
Can't wait

>>170086
Found the leaf!

>>169900
Lmao funny

>>169901
Because of Nazis?

>>171008
Because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster

>>169901
Not to mention a few minor devastating incidents of destructive malfunction.